Con
Mitch Earleywine, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at Albany, noted in a Nov. 17, 2005 press release:
“Not only does marijuana not cause depression, it looks like it may actually alleviate it…
Those who use marijuana to battle the symptoms of illness may be depressed because of their illness, not because of marijuana. Studies that do not identify medical use might falsely implicate marijuana, rather than sickness, as the cause of depressed feelings…
Thirty percent to 40% of patients with bipolar disorder are not consistently helped by or cannot tolerate standard medications. In the course of the authors’ studies of the medical uses of cannabis (Grinspoon & Bakalar 1997), a number of sufferers were discovered who believed marihuana to be more effective than conventional anti-manic drugs, or who used it to relieve the side effects of lithium.”
Nov. 17, 2005